


Sparks Fly

by HonorH



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: AU, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-09
Updated: 2012-05-09
Packaged: 2017-11-05 01:57:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/401198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HonorH/pseuds/HonorH
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the Girl on Fire Ficathon. Prompt: "Prim goes to the 74th Hunger Games, where she meets and befriends Rue."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sparks Fly

A week after Katniss's nineteenth birthday, Prim is called at the reaping. No matter how much Katniss howls and screams that she volunteers, she can't. So Prim, just twelve, is sent off to the Capitol after promising her sister she'll come back.

Her training score is not promising, no matter how hard she worked for that week. Everyone expects she'll die at the Cornucopia.

Only, she doesn't. Prim survives, grabbing a backpack amid the confusion and running into the woods. The woods, which for so long frightened her to petrification, suddenly seem the safest place to be.

She forages, years of Katniss's teaching and her father's book ingrained in her mind. She sleeps safe in a tree as the Careers hunt below.

But she has no weapons beyond a small utility knife from her pack, and she can't hunt. By the third day, she's desperate for meat. She watches a fat squirrel on a branch and knows she could shoot him now, if only she had a bow.

A rock comes flying out of the bushes, expertly aimed, and hits the squirrel in the head, knocking it to the ground. And Rue, Prim's fellow twelve-year-old, steps out, smiling.

"Want some?" she asks.

They share the squirrel and make a pact. They can survive better together than separately, they decide. Rue can hunt, and Prim can forage.

They do so for days, narrowly avoiding the Career pack. Together, they drop a tracker jacker nest on them and steal weapons from the fallen girls from One and Four. Together, they find a way to destroy the Careers' supplies. Together, they lay a trap for Marvel from One, Prim running like a deer, leading her hunter until he falls into the pit trap they've constructed. He breaks his leg. Clove, finding him later, gives him a quicker death than he perhaps deserves.

The Capitol is enchanted. Katniss and her mother watch as the commentators go on about these two tiny, fairy-like tributes running rings around the Careers, and they dare to hope.

Peeta, eighteen, steps in when Cato has Prim cornered. He shouts to the sky that he loves Katniss Everdeen, has always loved her, and he'll do anything to get Prim back to her alive.

Prim finds him later, gravely wounded, and all her healer's instincts can't put him back together.

"Promise me," he says, "promise me you'll tell her."

"I promise, Peeta." She sobs softly. "Thank you for the bread. We never thanked you."

He smiles, and he dies with her tears on his face.

Big Thresh kills Clove for Rue. "I can't protect you more than that, little one," he tells her. "You'd best run."

She does, and she and Prim cling to each other and cry, wiser than two twelve-year-olds should ever be.

One by one, they die. Even Cato, monstrous Cato. The girls are quick, slippery, and he overbalances on the Cornucopia and falls to the fearsome muttations below. Prim, with her healer's instincts, sends an arrow to stop his pain.

And then there are two. They cry and hold each other and swear friendship forever. And they grab handfuls of poison berries, because the Capitol cannot make them betray each other and themselves.

Claudius Templesmith hastily announces a change in the rules. Two allied winners, he says, are acceptable.

Panem watches these two children defeat the Capitol, and a nation begins to burn.


End file.
